Releasing mussels to restore the Anacostia

Happy Monday, DMV! It’s Sept. 28.

On Saturday afternoon, I went out to Kenilworth Marsh for a mussel release with the Anacostia Watershed Society. It was so much fun.

I got to wear waders for the first time. There were about 20 or so volunteers. We got a brief informational intro from Anacostia Watershed Society staffers Jorge Bogantes Montero, the natural resources program manager, and Grace Camarata, a restoration associate.

The Anacostia Watershed Society started assessing the mussels in the area in 2015 and found at least eight species in the Anacostia River. The organization began propagating freshwater mussels in 2018 with the help of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Harrison Lake National Fish Hatchery in Virginia.

Mussels are filter feeders and can each filter 10 to 20 gallons of water per day. They filter pollution and bacteria such as E. coli and help improve water clarity and conditions for underwater plants to grow.

But their population has declined due to habitat destruction, water pollution, climate change, invasive species and overuse of water for agriculture and other uses. Replenishing the mussel population helps improve the health of the river and its wetlands.

The Anacostia Watershed Society provides female mussels to the Harrison Lake hatchery, which raises the juveniles until they’re about a fourth of an inch in size. The hatchery then gives the organization the juveniles, which are grown in floating baskets in the river for about another year before they’re released.

“The bigger they are, the more chances of survival,” Jorge told the volunteers. Predators include catfish, muskrats, otters, ducks and other critters.

The species released Saturday were eastern lampmussels, born from one or two adult mussels, Grace said.

We put on our waders and walked about a mile to the release site on the marsh. Volunteers took turns pulling the wheeled cooler, which held about 1,000 mussels, about 200 of which were measured and tagged with the help of middle schoolers for later tracking and research.

I plunged my hand into the brown water in the cooler, gingerly picked up several mussels and placed them inside a blue mesh bag. Then I waded out. The weight of the water pressed in on the waders, making me feel like I was gently shrink-wrapped. Yet I stayed dry, which felt kind of magical.

Following Jorge’s instructions, we chucked the mussels out into the water.

We spotted water birds. Jorge pointed out the den of a muskrat, littered with the shells of Asian mussels that it likes to eat; and he showed us its little pawprint.

Jorge swept his hand to show us the lush marshlands and said that when he started restoration work in the area about 17 years ago, those green areas were just mud.

It was fun — to be in the water, yet completely dry inside the waders! And it felt great to be in nature, helping with the Anacostia Watershed Society’s work.

As I wrote today’s newsletter and showed my daughter the photos, she asked me to go again with her … so I signed us up for the last mussel release of the season.

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Capital Weather says: Winds ease today, and we may warm to near 70 before greater sunshine and warmth arrive midweek. Read the full forecast here.

After yoga class one day, my fellow yogi Rachel Barham came up to me, pulled out her phone and told me about an exciting bird citing downtown on the Mall. Beaming with joy, she poured out facts about the bird … that I couldn’t quite capture after yoga. So I asked her to write it down for me.

“On Wednesday, September 23, a locally very rare bird, a red-necked phalarope, showed up in the Capitol Reflecting Pool (no, not that reflecting pool, the one on the other side of the Mall), and birders have, um, flocked to see it,” she wrote.

“A lot of us got to observe this adorable little seabird doing its ‘spinning’ behavior, how they will swim around in very quick circles to make the water scare up some prey (aquatic invertebrates... yes, those apparently live in the Capitol Reflecting Pool).”

She continued: “Your first thought will be why is it black and white and not red — good question — it’s in nonbreeding plumage (many birds look very different when they’re not trying to attract mates or raise young).”

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s page about the red-necked phalarope says it is a “long-distance migrant,” breeding in the Arctic tundra and spending winter in tropical oceans, sometimes migrating over land, particularly in autumn.

“Long distance means that they spend the winter off the coast of Ecuador and Peru, and they fly all the way to Alaska and northern Canada to build nests and have babies. Every year. Think about that for a minute,” Rachel wrote.

“In parts of the western US, it’s not uncommon to see them on inland lakes during migration, but on the east coast, they’re usually spotted from boats out at sea.”

The bird stuck around for a few days then left over the weekend, Rachel told me in an email Sunday morning: “It appears unfortunately that the phalarope decided to move on — it was not seen at the reflecting pool yesterday!”

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